24 March, 2010

My body seems to have some sort of mute-filtering system. As I woke this morning from a dream of P in a faraway high school, I slowly became aware that my dream was in fact a dream.

I was in bed, still dreaming, and processing the facts of the dream as I lay there. Specifics on the dream are unimportant; like most recurring dreams, while it has great meaning to me personally, it would be extremely boring to have to read through on this journal.

At first, I started to hear the light snoring of my partner. She is next to me, I thought, enjoying her own personal dreams while I awake from mine. Whole seconds pass while I run down the last aspects of my dream, when, suddenly, I am bombarded with an influx of sound. The TV is on.

For a number of seconds after waking, but before waking fully, I was aware only of the sound of her light snoring, and not at all of the blasting sound coming from the tv. It was only less than ten seconds, but still: somehow my brain had been completely filtering out the sound of the television so as not to disturb me during sleep.

03 March, 2010

Okay, so the sun doesn't look green. But appearances can be deceiving. After all, everyone knows it's not yellow, even though that's the color that schoolchildren always use in drawings. Common wisdom says it's white—but what is white?

Click to enlarge.

White light is the combination of all colors of light. The sun is white because it emits all colors of light in our visible spectrum. Yet this brings up a question we rarely think about: is white a color?

If white is the combination of other colors, and black is the absence of other colors, can they really be considered colors at all? It's hard to answer this, because it depends on your definition of color. Color is defined so loosely that speaking clearly about it is almost impossible. It is better to speak of hues, such as red, green, purple, and orange. White is not a hue; rather, each hue can have a lighter tint or a darker shade to it. Orange, for example, is my favorite hue, but only when it has a particularly light tint to it. Dark orange shades seem like an entirely different color.

Of course, "white" is a term which corresponds to some sensation in the brain which we usually call color. But when looking at the different tints and shades in the image above, it becomes easy to see that white light is in fact some hue or combination of hues that has very low saturation and a very, very light tint. And if this is true, then the only question becomes whether sunlight contains one or more hues in greater concentration than the others.

In fact, sunlight does just that. The wavelength of sunlight varies throughout the visible spectrum (and more), but it is highly concentrated at the 500 nanometer wavelength: green.

Notice the peak at 500 nm.

So although sunlight appears white, the main hue it is consisted of is green. It just happens to be a very, very lightly tinted green of almost no saturation. Oh, and some other colors thrown in as well, but in far less of a concentration.

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The dividing lines are there, between each instantiation of "I", even if I can never quite get a glimpse of them. If I squint just so, fast-forwarding through the events of a past self, I don't quite reach a boundary so much as reach a gap. After which another "I" instantiates itself. The dividing line is there; I'm sure of it. But it only seems blurrily visible when I don't focus on it. As soon as my eye approaches, it disapparates into the ether.

One of the greatest joys I've personally experienced is that feeling you get when you genuinely change your mind. It's especially rewarding when you can feel the dominoes falling as each step in a logical sequence causes you to change your mind on increasingly complex lemmas after a basic premise's truth value switches.

I recently read a four year old article by Eliezer Yudkowsky on why Many Worlds survives Occam's razor. The argument was persuasive enough to cause me to change my mind on a stance I've held for nearly two decades.

I subscribe to a lot of podcasts. I use podcasts to keep up with the news, learn more about the world, and expand my mind generally. As such, I've sampled and stopped listening to more podcasts than most people have even heard of.

@EricHerboso

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